Above and beyond the call of duty

Be it part of a brand’s DNA or a one-off act of kindness, exceeding customer expectations can certainly build brand equity. However, the motivation for developing such a marketing strategy must come from the heart.

Going the extra mile for customers has been a way for certain brands to embed their name into people’s hearts and minds. Frontline staff working for brands such as Pret a Manger, Lastminute.com, Virgin Atlantic and Procter & Gamble’s Tide have gone beyond the call of duty to help people out, but are these just random acts of kindness or can they be part of a broader strategy marketers can use to build unbreakable relationships with consumers?

When the Icelandic volcanic ash cloud wreaked havoc across the travel industry last year, some brands in the travel sector said they couldn’t help because they were not responsible for the travel chaos. Others decided to put aside who was ’responsible’ and focus every possible resource on helping to get passengers to their chosen destinations.

One simple act can touch hundreds, if not thousands, of people through social media

Henry Mason, Trendwatching.com

That second group includes brands such as Lastminute.com, which had office staff remaining at work throughout the night so that they could help customers get home, according to UK and Ireland marketing director Mark Fells.

Although Lastminute is not a direct service provider in the same way as a hotel or airline, it was prepared to do this even though it has no legal obligation to help stranded consumers.

Others, such as Virgin Atlantic - which had aircraft grounded beyond the brand’s control - went into crisis mode. But UK marketing director Paul Dickinson says the airline recruits staff who have a “do more” attitude in line with Virgin’s brand values. During the ash cloud crisis, volunteers from a range of departments, including IT and finance, converged on Virgin’s call centres to help the 14,000 stranded passengers.

According to Dickinson, official job descriptions became irrelevant and “everybody mucked in”. Brands that go above and beyond the call of duty are able to do so because their staff have this innate willingness, he claims.

Some companies might just chance upon people with the right attitude, but “doing more” is something which the airline looks for when it is recruiting. This is based on Sir Richard Branson’s theory when he founded the brand in 1984 that if a challenger brand couldn’t be bigger than its rivals, it had to be better, and base itself on service rather than size.

Virgin Atlantic trains flight staff to make the most of helping people, for example by cooing over a baby and making it obvious to other passengers that it is providing special treatment. “Our approach came from a need for the business to be more memorable and stand out,” Dickinson explains. “If we thought about ourselves as just a transportation company, we probably wouldn’t still be here today because there are other brands that are bigger than us and maybe can offer more frequency or logistical advantages. As a smaller airline, we were never going to succeed just by being the same as everybody else.”

All customer-facing staff are taken through training programmes called Brilliant Basics and Magic Touches, and staff performance is also appraised by these standards. Dickinson says this links back to the business rationale that exceeding expectations means that people will advocate flying with the brand, which generates new and repeat business.

Pret a Manger also takes recruitment seriously, and says it only hires one in every seven people who apply for a job to make sandwiches and serve customers. As Pret says on its website: “When staff care, our business is sound. If they stop caring, our business goes down the drain.”

Staff are only hired on the collective decision of the rest of the employees in a particular Pret premises. Bonuses are given out when staff have performed well in a mystery shop, which happens every week.

More brands may tap into the unique identity the likes of Virgin Atlantic and Pret a Manger have built based on the premise of going above and beyond, but Dickinson says such a philosophy must be present from a brand’s inception.

“Inevitably more brands will start behaving like this, as they get bigger and blander and more disliked,” he says. “But you can’t just say you will be a certain way this year, and then next year decide to do something different.”

This is a similar principle to how The Co-operative operates its group of businesses. Its practices are based on policies developed by members rather than shareholders, which include certain ethical viewpoints. These ethics have led to The Co-operative’s financial arm behaving differently from most banks, such as reducing overdraft charges and turning away lucrative lending amounts.

US laundry brand Tide has also successfully introduced a new approach of “doing more”. The P&G-owned business has become synonymous with helping victims of natural disasters in a practical yet innovative way through its Loads of Hope programme.

Tide external relations manager Amanda Treeby says the initiative, which dispatches a Tide-branded truck filled with washers and dryers to disaster stricken communities, is a huge commitment that demonstrates its worth by driving brand buzz and preference. The programme has been so well received that people now ask for it to be sent when natural disasters affect them, but the brand has had to decide where and when it is appropriate.

Brands that don’t have the budget to take on such a commitment can still inject more meaning into what they do for consumers through random acts of kindness. Examples include juice brand Tropicana bringing the ’sun’ to the depths of the Arctic winter, and Interflora sending flowers to people who tweeted that they were having a bad day.

Henry Mason, head of research and analysis at Trendwatching.com, says brands are able to combine this strategy with social media to maximise the impact of one act, which may or may not be random.

Indeed, Tropicana’s Arctic sun YouTube video has had more than 120,000 views. “One simple act can touch hundreds, if not thousands, of people through social media,” says Mason.

Smaller brands can also perform unusual acts that please customers and go beyond what it is known for. Family-run brand Alphabet Photography, which started in the US and also has an office in Essex, filmed a flashmob choir singing the Hallelujah chorus from Handel’s Messiah in a shopping centre food court and posted it on YouTube.

The company included its website in a Christmas message at the end of the video, and UK managing director Michael Wise says he has since been overwhelmed not only with visits to the site but emails from people interested in recreating the set-up. The video, which had 32 million hits on YouTube, also attracted widespread media coverage.

“It cost quite a bit but the results went ballistic,” says Wise. “And if it brings people to our site because we put our brand at the end, it’s a bonus because it wasn’t done with that intent. We just did it to do a nice thing. But I still get emails from people who have seen the video and say that’s why they went to our site and bought some of our items.”

Alphabet Photography is an example of how a small act can generate unprecedented mileage for a start-up brand. Wise has also gone beyond the call of duty by giving a customer whose husband had passed away £130 worth of free photography. And at the Ideal Home Show, Wise gave some of his work to the event’s special guest Prince Charles as an early wedding present for Prince William and Kate Middleton.

“It’s not all about money in life. Sometimes it’s nice to have a bit of fun even if it is with a small gesture,” says Wise. “Being a smaller company, it is easier to have more personal contact with our customers. I think bigger brands always have more of a motive than the fact it is just a nice thing to do.”

But Trendwatching’s Mason warns that brands must tread a fine line between doing something nice and invading what is still people’s personal space, even if it is on a social network.

“It’s one thing to do something spontaneously nice and another if you are just pushing your brand at them. This is not something that can always work, because if it goes wrong, the very same social network that has allowed your good deed to spread can spread your insensitivity and inappropriateness,” he says.

And as Charlotte McEleny from Marketing Week’s sister title Reputation Online points out, brands might have building awareness and positivity as their ulterior motive, but it should never be too obvious that they are doing this.

Contrary to the point that Dickinson at Virgin Atlantic makes that all kind acts link back to the business’s bottom line, Trendwatching’s Mason says that when brands think too much like this it is harder to be genuine.

“These are not campaigns or initiatives that brands should be looking to measure the direct ROI from. If you are looking for specific sales, that’s the wrong approach,” he claims. “The motivation should be the kindness, and showing that the brand has a human side. Consumers aren’t stupid and it’s easy for them to see through it if brands are being obviously self-serving.”
Marketers may disagree with Mason’s argument about ROI. As the lines blur between brand strategy, corporate social responsibility and business strategy, justifying an activity is crucial, Treeby at Tide argues. Small acts can be too transient to have any real impact on a brand’s strategy, she claims.

“I think some brands are choosing ’random acts of kindness’ instead of developing a more committed programme,” Treeby notes. “I don’t think these two strategies compete but random acts are much more difficult to quantify in terms of what they deliver back to your brand.”

Whether it’s random acts of kindness or an ongoing brand positioning, it’s clear that brands that venture beyond their fundamental identities to create more three-dimensional reasons for their existence are capturing consumers’ hearts and budgets.

But while brands that go above and beyond the call of duty stand out for now, “doing more” will inevitably become a default benchmark. The challenge will then be not just coming up with creative ideas of what to do, but determining why a brand should do it - and why it matters to your business.